5
Lindsey could hear the chopper blades carving the night air, but she was no longer inside the craft. She was being wheeled across a parking lot toward a large building with many lighted windows. She thought she ought to know what it was, but she couldn't think clearly, and in fact she didn't care what it was or where she was going or why.
Ahead, a pair of double doors flew open, revealing a space warmed by yellow light, peopled by several silhouettes of men and women. Then Lindsey was rushed into the light and among the silhouettes … a long hallway … a room that smelled of alcohol and other disinfectants … the silhouettes becoming people with faces, then more faces appearing … soft but urgent voices … hands gripping her, lifting … off the gurney, onto a bed … tipped back a little, her head below the level of her body … rhythmic beeps and clicks issuing from electronic equipment of some kind.…
She wished they would just all go away and leave her alone, in peace. Just go away. Turn off the lights as they went. Leave her in darkness. She longed for silence, stillness, peace.
A vile odor with an edge of ammonia assaulted her. It burned her nasal passages, made her eyes pop open and water.
A man in a white coat was holding something under her nose and peering intently into her eyes. As she began to choke and gag on the stench, he took the object away and handed it to a brunette in a white uniform. The pungent odor quickly faded.
Lindsey was aware of movement around her, faces coming and going. She knew that she was the center of attention, an object of urgent inquiry, but she did not — could not manage to — care. It was all more like a dream than her actual dreams had been. A soft tide of voices rose and fell around her, swelling rhythmically like gentle breakers whispering on a sandy shore:
“… marked paleness of the skin … cyanosis of lips, nails, fingertips, lobes of the ears …”
“… weak pulse, very rapid … respiration quick and shallow …”
“… blood pressure's so damned low I can't get a reading …”
“Didn't those assholes treat her for shock?”
“Sure, all the way in.”
“Oxygen, CO-2 mix. And make it fast!”
“Epinephrine?”
“Yeah, prepare it.”
“Epinephrine? But what if she has internal injuries? You can't see a hemorrhage if one's there.”
“Hell, I gotta take a chance.”
Someone put a hand over her face, as if trying to smother her. Lindsey felt something plugging up her nostrils, and for a moment she could not breathe. The curious thing was that she didn't care. Then cool dry air hissed into her nose and seemed to force an expansion of her lungs.
A young blonde, dressed all in white, leaned close, adjusted the inhalator, and smiled winningly. “There you go, honey. Are you getting that?”
The woman was beautiful, ethereal, with a singularly musical voice, backlit by a golden glow.
A heavenly apparition. An angel.
Wheezing, Lindsey said, “My husband is dead.”
“It'll be okay, honey. Just relax, breathe as deeply as you can, everything will be all right.”
“No, he's dead,” Lindsey said. “Dead and gone, gone forever. Don't you lie to me, angels aren't allowed to lie.”
On the other side of the bed, a man in white was swabbing the inside of Lindsey's left elbow with an alcohol-soaked pad. It was icy cold.
To the angel, Lindsey said, “Dead and gone.”
Sadly, the angel nodded. Her blue eyes were filled with love, as an angel's eyes should be. “He's gone, honey. But maybe this time that isn't the end of it.”
Death was always the end. How could death not be the end?
A needle stung Lindsey's left arm.
“This time,” the angel said softly, “there's still a chance. We've got a special program here, a real—”
Another woman burst into the room and interrupted excitedly: “Nyebern's in the hospital!”
A communal sigh of relief, almost a quiet cheer, swept those gathered in the room.
“He was at dinner in Marina Del Rey when they reached him. He must've driven like a bat out of Hell to get back here this fast.”
“You see, dear?” the angel said to Lindsey. “There's a chance. There's still a chance. We'll be praying.”
So what? Lindsey thought bitterly. Praying never works for me. Expect no miracles. The dead stay dead, and the living only wait to join them.
THREE
1
Guided by procedures outlined by Dr. Jonas Nyebern and kept on file in the Resuscitation Medicine Project office, the Orange County General Hospital emergency staff had prepared an operating room to receive the body of Hatchford Benjamin Harrison. They had gone into action the moment the on-site paramedics in the San Bernardino Mountains had reported, by police-band radio, that the victim had drowned in near-freezing water but had suffered only minor injuries in the accident itself, which made him a perfect subject for Nyebern. By the time the air ambulance was touching down in the hospital parking lot, the usual array of operating-room instruments and devices had been augmented with a bypass machine and other equipment required by the resuscitation team.
Treatment would not take place in the regular emergency room. Those facilities offered insufficient space to deal with Harrison in addition to the usual influx of patients. Though Jonas Nyebern was a cardiovascular surgeon and the project team was rich with surgical skills, resuscitation procedures seldom involved surgery. Only the discovery of a severe internal injury would require them to cut Harrison, and their use of an operating room was more a matter of convenience than necessity.
When Jonas entered from the surgical hallway after preparing himself at the scrub sinks, his project team was waiting for him.
Because fate had deprived him of his wife, daughter, and son, leaving him without family, and because an innate shyness had always inhibited him from making friends beyond the boundaries of his profession, these were not merely his colleagues but the only people in the world with whom he felt entirely comfortable and about whom he cared deeply.
Helga Dorner stood by the instrument cabinets to Jonas's left, in the penumbra of the light that fell from the array of halogen bulbs over the operating table. She was a superb circulating nurse with a broad face and sturdy body reminiscent of any of countless steroid-saturated female Soviet track stars, but her eyes and hands were those of the gentlest Raphaelite Madonna. Patients initially feared her, soon respected her, eventually adored her.
With solemnity that was characteristic in moments like this, Helga did not smile but gave Jonas a thumbs-up sign.
Near the bypass machine stood Gina Delilo, a thirty-year-old RN and surgical technician who chose, for whatever reasons, to conceal her extraordinary competence and sense of responsibility behind a pert, cute, ponytailed exterior that made her seem to be an escapee from one of those old Gidget or beach-party movies that had been popular decades ago. Like the others, Gina was dressed in hospital greens and a string-tied cotton cap that concealed her blond hair, but bright-pink ankle socks sprouted above the elastic-edged cloth boots that covered her shoes.